Pelican

[David]

I just setup my new technical blog, http://www.digital-shokunin.net/ using a Python static site generator called Pelican (http://docs.notmyidea.org/alexis/pelican/).

I wanted more control over the look of my site then you get with Posterous, Tumblr, or Blogger.

I saw a lot of programmers/devs using OctoPress for their blog, a few advantages of a static site generator as opposed to a CMS like WordPress, its cheaper to host static content, especially in the cloud, static content doesn't require a database service or CPU load running server side scripting. If you pay by usage like on AWS, static content uses nothing but bandwidth really. S3 buckets or a github page can host a site with your domain for free/nearly free. The other advantage is a static site handles load much better, if you ever post anything that gets noticed on Slashdot, Reddit, or Hacker News, a small server hosting a Wordpress blog or Django site can be brought to its knees. Static content is much easier to serve out. Plus if you think about things like blogs, the scripts only need to be run when you post new content, not everytime someone hits a page, so it makes some sense to have it generate content once and publish every time you update. Comments, etc are handled by Disqus.

Another advantage, is that you don't have to custom config your httpd to handle your scripting language of choice, any http server works out of the box. A Raspberry Pi could easily serve a static content site with lots of clients hitting it.

Anyway, OctoPress is written in Ruby, and even following the directions, it was a mess, I could never get it working without running into some dependency error that was unsolvable even when Googling the problem. So I looked around and found Pelican, which as far as I can tell is every bit as featured as OctoPress but the key difference is it is written in Python. Soooo much easier to get going, most of the configuration was automatic, lots of little customization options, templating is pretty simple to setup if you want a different look. You write your posts in any text editor using one of two formatting options (like posting in a forum). Then run a local dev server to test your content and detects changes and regenerates if you save new files. You then publish your content out to your site when you're ready.  It's also very well documented.

Anyway, thought I would share that with you all in case anyone was looking for something to make your site but don't want to mess with Django or a micro framework.

[David]

Quick note, other then the official documentation, I found this blog entry very helpful in getting Pelican quickly setup.

http://vuongnguyen.com/creating-blog-python-virtualenv-pelican.html

[Francois Dion]

I was just testing that idea recently... I was able to get 75
concurrent connections going on the Raspberry Pi with Cherokee and
static web pages (from my blog) and stay within a 3 second response
time. It does highlight that a Pi for dynamic content wouldn't be an
option for a popular blog:

http://raspberry-python.blogspot.com/2013/01/raspberrypi-como-servidor-web.html

In spanish, but the test (using ab) is in english. Beside Pelican (and
that was also my first thought in the article), there is Nikola:

http://nikola.ralsina.com.ar/

I heard about it on the Argentinian python mailing list. It would be
interesting in doing a head to head comparison of the two...

Francois

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "PYthon Piedmont Triad User Group" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to pyptug+un...@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to pyp...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pyptug/-/CbMx2MgysF8J.
>
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>
>